Jonathan Kozol "Ordinary Resurrections"

“Cypress,” she replies, the street at the top of the hill that overlooks a large and controversial waste incinerator that went into operation here three years before.

The presence of the waste incinerator so close to the homes of people here has been a source of worry and frustration for the parents of the neighborhood since (Jonathan Kozol "Ordinary Resurections" 2000 p.86-9)

Eleanor was a descendant of one of the presidents of the United States. Her grandmother's grandmother was a seamstress and a slave and, she believed, the mistress of John Tyler. .....

"I told my counselor, 'I want to go to college.' Well, I can't explain the way she looked at me, but it was like the kids would say it now, 'Yeah, right!' You want to go to college!' .... (Jonathan Kozol "Ordinary Resurections" 2000 p.102-5)

“After our talk we found a cookie tin. Armando dressed in black for the occasion. Jefferson and Armando dug the hole. We said a prayer and sprinkled water on the cookie tin, and then the little ones threw dirt into the hole. I think that he was pleased, because he kept on bringing people out to see the grave. He dug her up three times to show his friends.”

Armando is the sports director at the church. He tries, as do most people on the staff, to give emotional support to kids like Jefferson when they have troubles in their home. Jefferson doesn’t open up to many grown-ups, though. He’s rather bashful and has melancholy eyes. When things are going well with him, he likes to race around the churchyard with the pastor and her dog. When things are going badly, he hardly talks at all. He gets a hunted look, like that of a small rabbit frozen by the headlights of a car.

Mother Martha says he chose the prayer they read during the burial. Later, he found two sticks and made a cross to stand above the grave. When warmer weather came, he went back to the grave and planted flowers in the grass. “The dog who ate his cat,” says Mother Martha, “is named Diesel–a good name, if you ask me, for an antisocial character who eats his friends.”

Jefferson is one of six or seven children from the neighborhood who spend hours of their time with Mother Martha and for whom she sweeps away appointments with all types of visitors, to the dismay of many who have often traveled a long way to get some time with her. Four of them are boys, and two or three, depending on the season or the year, are girls who are their sisters or their cousins. Katrice, a woman from the neighborhood who runs the free-food pantry at the church, refers to them as “Mother Martha’s gang” and disapproves of how they pester and pursue the priest all day. “Look at how they pull her clothes!” she says when they surround her as she’s coming from her car.

Jefferson brings animals he finds around the neighborhood into the garden of St. Ann's. He seems happy with the animals, more than he sometimes seems to be with people. He likes to hang around at night with Mother Martha and her dog before it's time for him to go across the street to sleep.

Why does this story about Jefferson set off some warning signals for me as a writer? Perhaps simply because I know the fairly hard-nosed attitudes that govern social policy in urban neighborhoods today and can anticipate that this may be perceived as a preposterous distraction from the bottom-line concerns with “discipline” and “rigor” and “job preparation” and “high standards” and what is now known as “high-stakes testing” and the rest of the severe agenda that has recently been put in place for inner-city kids. Burials for cats somehow don’t fit into this picture.

Then, too, in the business-minded ethos of our age, any money we may spend on children of poor people must be proven to be economically utilitarian and justifiable in cost-effective terms. But much of what goes on around St. Ann’s cannot be justified in terms like these. You could not prove to anyone in Washington that Mother Martha’s talk with Jefferson about the possibilities of an afterlife for animals will have “a positive effect” upon his reading scores or make him more employable a decade later.

Those, however, are the usual criteria for budgeting decisions in most programs that serve children. “Productivity” is almost everything. Elements of childhood that bear no possible connection to the world of enterprise and profit get no honor in the pedagogic world right now, nor do they in the economic universe to which it seems increasingly subservient.

Now and then I’m asked to go to conferences of urban school officials, corporation leaders and consultants, and the representatives of agencies that serve (or, as the jargon now requires, “service”) inner-city youth. The atmosphere is very different at these sessions than it was only about ten years ago. The dialogue is managerial and structural, and its vocabulary tends to be impersonal and technocratic, weighted down by hyphenated words such as “performance-referenced,” “outcome-oriented,” “competency-centered.” One hears a lot of economics, many references to competition and “delivery of product” and, of course, high standards and exams. Questions that concern the inner health of children, or their happiness or sadness, or their personalities as complicated, unpredictable and interesting little people don’t come up at all, or if they do, are often treated as a genteel afterthought and handled with dispatch and even traces of derision.

The settings for these gatherings, which business leaders sometimes underwrite, are generally extravagant. Guests are inundated with expensively produced materials: shoulder bags embossed with corporate logos, loose-leaf notebooks filled with corporate position papers. The feeling of a public school is far removed from all of this. People rarely speak of children; you hear of “cohort groups” and “standard variations,” but you don’t hear much of boys who miss their cats or 6-year-olds who have to struggle with potato balls. If a bunch of kids like Elio and Pineapple–two of the lively children I have known at St. Ann’s Church for many years–were seated at the table, it would seem a comical anomaly. Statistical decorum would be undermined by the particularities of all these uncontrollable and restless little variables.

The relentless emphasis at these events is on the future economic worth that low-income children may or may not have for our society. Policy discussions seem to view them less as children who have fingers, elbows, stomachaches and emotions than as “economic units”–pint-sized deficits or assets in blue jeans and jerseys, some of whom may prove to be a burden to society, others of whom may have some limited utility.

“The right kind of investment,” says the former CEO of a large corporation that sells toothpaste and detergent, “from conception to age 5, will pay back every dollar we spend at least four for one, plus interest, plus inflation. I don’t know of a factory anybody can build that will give that kind of return.” However intended, it seems a peculiar way to speak of children.

The trouble with this is that “investment values,” whether in petroleum, in soy or in the children of poor people, rise and fall. What if a future generation of geneticists, economists or both should come to the conclusion that the children of St. Ann’s don’t offer a sufficient payoff to a corporation’s bottom line to warrant serious investment? We hear the stirrings of such notions even now in writings that allude to IQ differentials between racial and religious subgroups of the population. The subgroup living in Mott Haven does not stand too high within these rankings. If investment value is the governing determination here, black and Hispanic boys and girls like Elio and Pineapple are certain to be given less of almost everything that can bring purpose or fulfillment to existence than the seemingly “more valuable” white and Asian children who get into schools like Stuyvesant, New York’s most famous high school for the academic elite. (Jonathan Kozol "Ordinary Resurections" 2000 p.134-7)

Advocates for children, most of whom dislike this ethos, nonetheless play into it in efforts to obtain financial backing from the world of business. “A dollar spent on Head Start,” they repeat time and again, “will save our government six dollars over twenty years” in lowered costs for juvenile detention and adult incarceration. It’s a point worth making if it’s true, although it’s hard to prove; and, still, it is a pretty dreadful way to have to think about 4-year-olds. The fact that such a program allows a child the size of Mariposa–one of the littlest children at St. Ann’s and one of many in the neighborhood who suffer from chronic asthma–several hundred mornings with warmhearted people in a safe and friendly pastel-painted setting seems to be regarded as too “soft,” too sentimental, to be mentioned in the course of these discussions. “We should invest in kids like these,” we’re told, “because it will be more expensive not to.” Why does our natural compassion or religious inclination need to find a surrogate in dollar savings to be voiced or acted on? Why not give these kids the best we have because we are a wealthy nation and they’re children and deserve to have some fun while they’re still less than four feet high?

Or is the point here that we don’t believe this? Sometimes it seems that “having fun” is seen as a luxurious entitlement that cannot be accorded to the child of a woman who relies on welfare lest it make dependent status too enjoyable. It seems at times that happiness itself is viewed as an extravagance and that our sole concerns in dealing with such children must be discipline, efficiency and future worth.

The problem is not only that low-income children are devalued by these mercantile criteria; childhood itself is also redefined. It ceases to hold value for its own sake but is valued only as a “necessary prologue” to utilitarian adulthood. The first ten, twelve or fifteen years of life are excavated of inherent moral worth in order to accommodate a regimen of basic training for the adult years that many of the poorest children may not even live to know. There is no reference to investing in the present–in the childhood of children–only in a later incarnation of the child as a “product” or “producer.”

“We must start to think about these inner-city children as our future entry-level workers,” we are told by business leaders as they forge their various alliances and partnerships with poorly funded urban schools. It’s fair to ask why we are being urged to see “these” children in that quite specific way. Why are we to look at Elio and see a future entry-level worker rather than to see him, as we see our own kids, as perhaps a future doctor, dancer, artist, poet, priest, psychologist or teacher, or whatever else he might someday desire to be? Why not, for that matter, look at him and see the only thing he really is: a 7-year-old child? Mariposa is not simply thirty-seven pounds of raw material that wants a certain “processing” and “finishing” before she can be shipped to market and considered to have value. She is of value now, and if she dies of a disease or accident when she is 12 years old, the sixth year of her life will not as a result be robbed of meaning.

St. Ann’s runs an excellent afterschool and literacy program for approximately eighty children. Civic leaders from the downtown business world stop by at times to meet the children and for conversations with the priest. They often get more than they bargained for.

Mother Martha is a fearless woman who speaks truth to power and does not allow her strong political beliefs to be subdued or suffocated by the pretense of civility so common in the upper reaches of the press and power structure in New York. She cuts right through the philanthropic piety of many visitors. “Charity is not a substitute for justice,” she says frequently. She’s unsparing also in her reference to the seemingly eternalized apartheid of New York–99.8 percent of children in the schools that serve this neighborhood are black or brown, and she does not let visitors forget this. Even the most tough-minded CEOs look shaken sometimes after they have talked with her.

But the presence and the sheer vitality of all these children have a powerful effect upon the visitors as well. Once they’re here, it seems, their ideologies disintegrate. An intimate reality does often have this power to collapse or modify belief. Nobody seems to want to advocate a “lean and mean” approach to public services for children while they’re sitting in the chapel of St. Ann’s with Elio or being drilled with questions by Pineapple.

The parents and staff at St. Ann’s aren’t naïve about the world of economic competition that their children will be forced to enter in a few more years. The pedagogic program at the afterschool is rigorous. The women and men who run the program have a lot of love and hot sauce in their style, but they also have a realistic recognition of the academic needs of children. The church is also forced to pay attention to the newly instituted tests the children have to pass in public school. No one here, no matter how benighted they may think these tests are, has any hesitation about working hard with children on test-taking skills, because they know that children in rich neighborhoods receive this preparation as a matter of routine, often in expensive private programs.

Intensive academics aren’t the whole of what goes on here at the afterschool, however. If they were, the children wouldn’t come here with such eagerness when they leave public school. Amid the pressures and the tensions about school promotion policies (and nonpromotion policies, which recently have come to be capricious and severe) and reading skills, percentile “norms,” math exams and high school applications or rejections, and the rest of what makes up the pedagogic battlefield–which is not now, and never was, a level field for children in poor neighborhoods like the South Bronx–the grown-ups here have also managed somehow to leave room for innocence.

The pastor here has her three degrees: in economics (as an undergraduate at Radcliffe), then in law, and then theology. She also has a bracelet made of jelly beans that Jefferson’s sister gave her as a present before Easter. It is, she told me once when I was looking at the brightly colored jelly beans that Jefferson’s sister somehow linked together with a needle and a piece of string, the only bracelet anyone has given her since childhood–“more beautiful,” she said with pride, “than finest pearls.” In an age of drills and skills and endless lists of reinvented standards and a multitude of new and sometimes useful but too often frankly punitive exams, it’s nice to find a place where there is still some room for things of no cash value–oddball humor, silliness and whim, a child’s love, a grown-up’s gratitude and joy–that never in a hundred years would show up as a creditable number on one of those all-important state exams.

Competitive skills are desperately needed by poor children in America, and realistic recognition of the economic roles that they may someday have an opportunity to fill is obviously important too. But there is more to life, and there ought to be much more to childhood, than readiness for economic functions. Childhood ought to have at least a few entitlements that aren’t entangled with utilitarian considerations. One of them should be the right to a degree of unencumbered satisfaction in the sheer delight and goodness of existence in itself. Another ought to be the confidence of knowing that one’s presence on this earth is taken as an unconditioned blessing that is not contaminated by the economic uses that a nation does or does not have for you. What I admire most about the programs and the atmosphere of daily life here at the church is that these diverse goals are reconciled in relatively seamless ways that make it possible for children to regard the world, and life itself, as something that, though difficult and often filled with pain and tears, is also sometimes good, and sometimes bountiful in foolishness, and therefore beautiful.

I recognize that jelly beans will not be seen by all Episcopalian officials as appropriate adornments for the vicar of an urban church, but it means something to Jefferson’s sister when she sees the pastor wear that bracelet as she stands before the cross to celebrate the mass. The details of life renew our faith in life. In the busy ministries of grief the detailed things–the Band-Aids and the skinned knees and the handiwork of children’s fingers–are too easily dismissed or relegated to the margins of consideration. I’ve been thankful that the detailed things are not forgotten in the course of all the solemn matters that preoccupy the pastor of St. Ann’s.

People ask me why I keep on going back to visit at this church when there are other churches in New York that operate effective programs that teach children useful skills each afternoon when they are done with school. I don’t usually answer. If I did, I know I wouldn’t say too much about the writing program and test-preparation program and computer classes. They’re good programs, but a “program,” even one that has some provable success, would not have brought me back into a church in the South Bronx nearly 200 times. If I had to answer, I would say that I go back for all the things that can’t be calibrated by exams. Elio’s imagination and his curiosity and tenderness are part of this, and Pineapple’s unselfishness, and Jefferson’s shyness and sweet sadness, and his closeness to the priest, and Jefferson’s cat.

Two years have passed. On quiet afternoons the boy with melancholy eyes goes by himself sometimes into the chapel of St. Ann’s and kneels down on the floor to say prayers for his mother and his cat. Mother Martha sometimes prays beside him. I have never asked the pastor what she prays for. (Jonathan Kozol "Ordinary Resurrections" 2000 p.138-43) The Details of Life This article is adapted from Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope (Crown). By Jonathan Kozol

Across the water from the prison island, next to yet another sewage plant and trash-deposit station in Hunts Point in the South Bronx, there's a multistory prison barge that has been used in recent years for children in detention. Several thousand juveniles thirteen years old or older have been held there at one point or other in a given year – about one hundred at a time – while they awaited transfer to more permanent facilities. It's a tremendous structure, with six floating floors of prison cells, one of them under water. From the sky, however, it looks decorative. It's painted in clean colors, blue and white, and looks as if it might be some sort of a pleasure craft, a cruise ship possibly.

The city spends $64,000 yearly to incarcerate an adult inmate on the prison island. It spends $93,000 yearly to incarcerate a child on the prison barge or in the very costly and imposing new detention center built on St. Ann's Avenue. That's abut eleven times as much as it is spending, on the average, for a year of education for a child in the New York City public schools during the last years of the 1990s – eighteen times what it is spending in a year to educate a mainstream student in an ordinary first-grade classroom in the schools of the South Bronx. There are countless academic studies of allegedly "deficient" social values in the children of the poor, but I do not know of any studies of the values of the educated grown-ups who believe this is a healthy way to run a social order. (Jonathan Kozol "Ordinary Resurections" 2000 p.154-5)

Jonathan Kozol "Ordinary Resurrections" 2000 cited by "Squish Like Grape"

The teacher, whose name is Frances Dukes, was doing a reading lesson when I entered. The story she's reading is a fable about animals with simple pastel illustrations.

"There once was a wolf who loved to eat," she reads. "As soon as he finished one meal, he began to think of the next." The wolf, she says, elaborating (Jonathan Kozol "Ordinary Resurections" 2000 p.172-3)

Chapter 19

A Pastor’s Ministry

Why is it that some children seem to be so strong and full of energy and hopefulness about their lives and manage to do well in school despite the most discouraging conditions in their neighborhood while other children facing the same obstacles appear unable to prevail?

For people who write on education, as I do, there is a premium on coming up with neatly packaged answers to this question; but the actual answers, as we generally concede to one another when we’re not advancing a particular agenda, tend to be as unpredictable, and various, as life itself, and character, and chance, and personality.

For some of the kids I know whose parents have led troubled lives, the greatest source of moral strength may lie in a grandmother, though the problems that the children face as they become teenagers often overwhelm even the strongest of grandmothers. In other cases, it may be a deep religious faith that keeps a child in a positive and optimistic frame of mind. In still others, it’s a potent sense of humor that enables children to turn sorrows into smiles. Many times, it’s simply pure good luck in running into an extraordinary teacher, doctor, minister, or priest. If I had to narrow it to one, I’d likely point to the religious factor; but that is probably because I have been spending so much time with children at the church and so I see that little light glowing particularly brightly.

There’s a student at the afterschool, named Leonardo, who asks frequently if he can talk with me alone in the computer room. He often has a glum look on his face. He gets depressed about the situation in his home, which isn’t good. His mother is in Honduras, and the relatives he lives with aren’t affectionate to him. He wears a dreary-looking U.S. Army jacket every day to school. It’s like his “uniform,” the badge of his perpetual depression.

On Sundays, though, he stands beside the pastor at the altar as one of her acolytes. On that day he gets to wear the wonderful white robe and ties the rope around his waist and looks resplendent there beside Pineapple and Briana and the other kids who also serve as acolytes. Sometimes he hands the wine to Mother Martha in the moments just before communion. Other days, he carries the censer or the cross. He waves to friends when he thinks Mother Martha isn’t looking. It’s the only time that I can think of when he seems entirely happy.

“The bread is good!” he told me once last year when he had noticed that I didn’t take communion. “It’s good!” he kept repeating, as if it were not a tasteless wafer but a slice of buttered pumpernickel. “Try it!” he said. “You’ll like it!”

Leonardo, like the other children, knows that I am Jewish, so I asked if he was trying to convert me through my appetite. He said no but kept on coaxing me for several days whenever he ran into me downstairs.

“The bread is good!” he’d say with teasing laughter in his eyes. He sounded like a salesman for communion—or a bakery.

“Try it! You’ll like it!” he would say without the need to let the other children know exactly what this was referring to. The fact that there was now a private joke between us seemed to be the thing that made this fun for him.

He didn’t take communion lightly, though. I can’t think of any children at the church who do. Even the teenage boys who slip into the church after the service has begun and slouch in one of the back rows, with base- ball hats still on their heads, as if this were a boring duty or a sullen favor for their mother, don’t look sullen in the least when they kneel down to take the wafer on their tongue at the communion rail. All of the teenagers do not pray; but when they do most of them seem to pray devoutly.

Prayer, of course, is a pervasive part of life among the children at St. Ann’s and isn’t limited to services that take place at specific times and are mandated by church calendars. Many services take place unplanned when children wander up into the pastor’s office at a time when they’re upset and simply ask if they can pray with her. These services are held most often in the smaller chapel that is also used for tutoring on crowded afternoons. Vespers, which are quiet early-evening services, are held there too. (Jonathan Kozol "Ordinary Resurections" 2000 p.243-5)

The pastor holds two services and gives two sermons Sunday morning, one in English, one in Spanish. She stays up late on Saturdays to write her sermons, which are crafted carefully, but not ornate, and seldom driven by exaggerated rhythms of rhetorical momentum. There are even silences at times, not big ones—hesitations really—when she’s talking to the congregation. I don’t know if they’re intentional; and, if I asked, I think that she’d deny this. But they do have an effect. They seem to open up some “space.” That’s just about the only way I can describe it.

I know nothing of theology; but it occurs to me that modest hesitations—normal ones, like those in ordinary conversations—may allow a bit more space than a relentless speaking style does for people in a congregation who may feel the world has tried to clip their wings and that the powers and the principalities of their society might actually prefer it if they didn’t fly too high.

This idea of leaving, or permitting, open spaces that another person, who has never been to college or to seminary, has an opportunity to fill is not something that the priest has ever spoken of. If I actually did question her, I’m sure she’d tell me not to read so deeply into random hesitations on a morning when she’s simply tired or distracted. Still, I think it does reflect an aspect of her personality and represents, even unconsciously, an element of pedagogic style that may have an unexpectedly empowering effect. Whether on a weekday morning in a fourth-grade classroom or on Sunday in the sanctuary of a church, I think that passages of normal hesitation and, at times, a searching pause that speaks of a respect for silence can accomplish things that flashier and more inexorable performances cannot.

Thomas Merton said once of the contemplative life that it should offer those who enter it “an area, a space of liberty, of silence,” in which “possibilities are allowed to surface and new choices . . . become manifest”—a space in time, he said, “which can enjoy its own potentialities and hopes.” Silences, however, in monastic life or any other area of life, need not be abdications. In her sermons at St. Ann’s, the pastor’s words, though often stated softly, can be charged with adversarial intensity. When she speaks of the endemic inequalities of education, healthcare, recreation, and aesthetics in New York, she doesn’t simply say, for instance, that rich people “have advantages.” She words it with a sharper specificity. She says, “They take advantages,” refusing to accept the too convenient notion of injustice as an accidental consequence of unintended processes—“the way things are”—but making clear that these injustices, at least, are consequences of decisions people make to benefit themselves at the expense of others.

New York City has for decades shipped some of its ugliest and smelliest waste products to be burned, recycled, transferred, or just piled up and stored in the South Bronx, and Mother Martha is convinced, as are so many doctors, that this is a direct cause of the respiratory illnesses of people of all ages at St. Ann's. The city also sends much of its sewage to West Harlem to be processed at a plant that brought the stench of excrement into the homes of thousands of black and Hispanic families in the area for several years. Mother Martha never speaks of this the way the mainstream press tends to describe it as a mostly technical dilemma that might prove at worst to be “misguided” or “unsound.” She speaks of it as social and environmental theft, as she did recently in an unsparing sermon titled “Stealing Air.”

The idea of unauthored evil, of inert and agentless injustice where advantages and disadvantages are doled out more or less by chance (clean air and charming neighborhoods with nice boutiques and outdoor restaurants on one side of the city, children wheezing from their asthma, waking up each day to odors of incinerators and of burning trash and plastics on the other side), may be appeasing, and is certainly exonerating, to the powerful. The pastor does not swallow this mythology.

When the press rejoices, for example, in the “cleanup” of Times Square—a reference to the banishment of beggars and the homeless and the prostitutes and sex shops that were once familiar there—she notes how many of the homeless people banished from Manhattan have been moved to shelters or substandard housing in Mott Haven and how many wait in line at the food pantry at St. Ann’s, which has run out of food for the first time in 1998 and 1999 as more and more of those who have been hidden from the sight of tourists end up in this neighborhood.

The privileged, as she observes, are not the passive beneficiaries of these policies and plans. “These actions are not agentless. They’re planned, devised, and engineered by those who also have the means to win the acquiescence of the poor by holding out rewards for not complaining.”

The suppression of this kind of language and the substitution of a terminology of falsified consensus are a part of what some of my journalistic friends in New York City call “civility.” Mother Martha calls it “suffocation” and “the false peace” of the privileged. One seldom sees those kinds of words in the newspapers, as one selfdom sees a word such as “injustice” or “oppression” or, as Mother Martha notes, “an unambiguous, plain-spoken word like ‘segregation’ ”—not, at least, in reference to New York—unless these words are placed within quotation marks in order to suggest that language of this sort is unacceptable.

“Rome’s peace is not God’s peace,” as she stated it one Sunday morning—bravely, I believe, because her reference was to institutions of the press that many people with so little power might not wish to challenge so directly. “False prophets cry ‘peace, peace’ where there is no peace,” she continued, or where “there’s a false peace” that has been established as “a cover-up intimidation of the poor.” Jesus, she said, came to earth “in order to disturb the false peace of the Romans and to free God’s people once and evermore.”

I asked her once why she said “evermore,” because the “false peace” she had spoken of seems constantly— indeed, hypnotically—to be restored. “The struggle goes on,” she said, sounding more like a Black Panther, or one of the radical Young Lords for whom she used to do pro bono work, than like the woman she once was who rode her bike through Harvard Square en route to class among her fellow-students at the university, where legacies of opportunity are handed down routinely from one generation to the next.

How are the social loyalties of someone who was treated well by our society when she was young so radically transformed? The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, whom I came to know in 1969 when he was living temporarily in Cambridge and I used to bring some of my students to his home on Sunday afternoons, would sometimes speak of people “dying from their class” to be reborn with a new loyalty to other social classes that they may have scorned, ignored, or even viewed as humanly dismissable before. “To break the ties, to step away from all the benefits our birth afforded us, to see the world in a new way and take our vision not from books about the poor but from the poor themselves,” he told me once with a great smile in his eyes, old socialist and Christian and sweet person that he was, “this is their Easter!” (Jonathan Kozol "Ordinary Resurections" 2000 p.246-9)

I don’t know what prompts a woman born to privilege and polished to sophistication in the finest schools and given rapid access to considerable opportunities for wealth and status by her competence in law, to give it up, already in the middle of her life, and choose instead to be ordained a priest and then accept a vicarage at an impoverished church. I do know there’s no maudlin piety or philanthropic sacramentalism in her style. The pastor is, thank God, more fun to be with, and more humanly transparent, and a great deal more defiant of established power, than a number of the philanthropic ones who end up in church windows. (Jonathan Kozol "Ordinary Resurections" 2000 p.249)

Above all, she does not pretend to be what she is not. An educated woman in a neighborhood where education levels are extremely low, she never pretends not to possess the tactical and verbal and forensic competence she really has. Ever since the 1960s, I have known white people who were so determined to conceal their educational attainments in the presence of a poor community of color that they’d even undermine their syntax and adopt street phrases, or would shade their phrasings with Latino accents, in an effort to defend themselves against those ever-present local demagogues who might attack them otherwise for their skin color or their education.

I am very much aware, uncomfortably so, that I fell into this peculiar habit too, because good friends in Roxbury at last gave me a talking-to. “We don’t want you with arms tied behind your back,” a very kind and candid local leader named Paul Parks told me one day when we were coming from a meeting. “That doesn’t equalize the game. We know your education. Use it for our children!”

Perhaps, like other young white activists, I had the strange idea that I could circumvent racism if I hid or manacled my actual effectiveness in areas in which I did have skills, because I felt I had attained them in an unjust social order. To leaders in the black community, however, this was, in itself, a racist exercise—and an unhealthy one.

Mother Martha doesn’t waste her time with rituals like these. Her sermons, as I’ve said, do often leave a pause of hesitation, and they’re usually understated, and they’re worded plainly (half the congregation on most Sundays are young children, so plain language is good pedagogy too); but in the actions that she takes, and in the confrontations she does not avoid, she draws on every bit of knowledge that she has, including what she knows about the ways in which a meritocracy of money can perpetuate itself.

Eleanor had some knowledge of these things from secondhand familiarity. The pastor knows about these things—the “test preps,” the small classes around maple tables, and the playing fields, and the expensive science labs, and the exquisite elm trees at the private prep schools—from her own experience and that of her brother and her father; and she compares this constantly, sometimes explosively, with what is given to the children of Mott Haven.

This “dual vision,” as I would describe it, adds a layer of political and moral texture to the way she analyzes certain of the challenges faced by the children of St. Ann’s; but it also adds a constant sense of tension between struggling for piecemeal victories on one hand and envisioning a larger and more sweeping challenge to the structures of injustice on the other.

As unprotected as she seems when she speaks from her heart about these issues of class privilege, the pastor is not frail. “Mother Martha,” says the poet and historian Juan Castro, who lives very near the church, on St. Ann’s Avenue, and knows the pastor well, “is tougher than any six men that I know,” a statement that I know he means admiringly, although a hint of chauvinism in his choice of words has now and then led to a verbal fray between the two of them. Others, including powerful black leaders like the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who has visited St. Ann’s and knows the priest, have voiced a similar reaction. (Jonathan Kozol "Ordinary Resurections" 2000 p.250-1)

Religious activists from other cities who have met the priest have made allusions to Dorothy Day when speaking of her fearlessness and willingness to take the blows and not do too much dodging and evading. She pays a price for this, however. Some years ago she did some legal research and discovered that the CEO of one of the prestigious TV networks was a partner and investor in the company that owned the shamefully neglected buildings in which dozens of the St. Ann's children were residing. "I want you to come to the neighborhood and see the way your tenants live," she said when she was able to get through to him. He indicated that he’d like to come someday but could not do it then because, he said, “My chauffeur’s on vacation.” Clearly, you do not endear yourself to someone with enormous wealth and, in this instance, with the power of retaliation when you try to make him see some of the suffering from which he’s managed to obtain a valuable tax-shelter.

Some ministers are forced by indigence to be accomplished courtiers. They learn to navigate between two worlds, excoriating money-changers in their sermons Sunday morning and then having lunch with them perhaps on Tuesday to obtain a badly needed contribution. Some establish what are known as “partnerships” with business leaders or with business corporations and essentially go into business with them as developers of real estate or in related local projects of this sort. Pastors of the poor are frequently accorded more esteem by the newspapers for commercial victories than for the work of justice or the mystery of faith. The Church Entrepreneurial gets more attention often than the church as church—the “little church,” the ti-église, as it is said in Haiti—where a man like Lazarus and one like Francis might have prayed together.

Pastors drawn into the world of commerce often bring real benefits to their communities, but pay a price for these entanglements that others do not see. Still, it’s hard to know if any person in religious life who’s not a contemplative can accomplish anything of value that does not involve some contradictions, especially in searching for financial help; and even contemplatives and the abbots of the monasteries, as we know from Merton’s journals, have been caught up in these contradictions also.

I think the presence of so many children at St. Ann’s, so many daily crises, and the whole rich stew of life, emergency, activity, and hecticness compel the priest to improvise in ways that lend an almost comic pragmatism to her intermittent efforts to solicit charitable help. She doesn’t have much chance to go downtown for personal solicitations; she writes some letters but they often sound as if they were done quickly, which I’m sure they generally were. The few requests for charitable grants she’s let me see were rather brisk, and even somewhat amateurish, and did not have any of the customary breakdowns (like “objectives” and “evaluations”) and those never-quite-convincing mathematical projections that are part of many grant proposals.

“I didn’t have time for that,” she told me last year in September when she had to race down to Manhattan late one night to get a letter stamped and canceled just in time to meet the deadline on an application. Her teenage secretary had just left (she was about to have her baby) and there were a number of emergencies that week. The time that might have gone into the writing of a detailed application got consumed by ordinary things like helping children with their homework, finding somebody to take her secretary’s place, visiting a child’s mother in the hospital, and going with Katrice to Western Beef, a local grocery, to buy necessities for the soup kitchen as the growing lines of hungry people at the church outran the limited supplies of food that came from charity.

The church gets by. Some unrepentant liberals and others acting on religious principle make generous donations to the children’s programs and do not expect her to waste time with the formalities. Some of them know the kids and know the nature of her life and think her time is better spent in doing more important things, like helping Elio with his arithmetic. (Jonathan Kozol "Ordinary Resurections" 2000 p.251-3)

What is it like, in human terms, to be the one on whom so many other people in a neighborhood rely at times of fear and darkness in their lives?

Visitors arriving at St. Ann’s for the first time are generally stirred by the emotional aesthetic of the atmosphere and often comment also on the nerve with which the pastor faces down the children’s adversaries. They do not always see, as I did not see at the start—because I was perhaps afraid to see—the weariness and loneliness and times of deep anxiety, which even pastors who seem poised and decorous in their ecclesiastical accoutrements when standing there before the cross to celebrate the mass inevitably undergo at times when they feel overburdened and unequal to the obligations they must bear.

We know that people in despair cry to the priest. To whom does the priest cry? I suppose the proper answer ought to be “to God.” But priests and ministers need human shoulders too. The pastor spends a lot of time with children in the garden to dispel their worries and her own, and also, as I often feel, because a sense of understandable enchantment with the personalities of children is an elemental part of her own personality. “Those kids will look for her!” Katrice said once when we were watching Mother Martha on the sidewalk with a bunch of children who were tugging at her clothes to capture her attention. “If she’s not here, they’ll keep on coming back all day and asking me, ‘Katrice? Did you see Mother Martha?’ ” Still, the priest cannot permit the little ones to know her deepest fears. She has a son, a teenage boy whom she took in when he was twelve in answer to his mother’s final prayer before she died of cancer. His father is an alcoholic. His brother and sister have been intermittently in various drug programs and in prison for the past ten years. The pastor often finds his brother lying on the sidewalk near Alí’s when she goes there to get a cup of coffee in the afternoon. She waits until an ambulance arrives to take him to the hospital, where he remains only a day or two before he wanders off into whatever places offer him the medication of despair—cocaine or heroin or alcohol—and ultimately reappears outside Alí’s.

A store not far from where he frequently collapses is believed to be a front for sale of drugs. Across the street, but farther up the block, there is another store in which Katrice suspects that drugs are sold as well. I’ve been in that store a few times with Isaiah. There’s little for sale, and there are never many customers during the day; so it seems probable Katrice is right. The priest knows all of this but cannot fight on six or seven fronts at once. She has to make the surgical decision to address one crisis now, the other one tomorrow. By tomorrow, there are always several more.

One day when she and I were walking with Katrice on St. Ann’s Avenue to buy some minor items needed at the church, a woman who was standing not quite on the street and not quite on the curb, but poised in what appeared to be a temporary indecision or confusion in between, gestured to the priest as we drew near. There was a child with her, maybe eight or nine years old. The woman and the pastor hugged each other and the woman kissed the priest, but looked disturbed, as if she’d just received upsetting news, so Mother Martha asked her whether there was something wrong. The woman lifted one hand in the air in front of her and held it level with the street and tilted it just slightly up and down.

“Not so good now, Mother,” she said in a worried voice. (Jonathan Kozol "Ordinary Resurections" 2000 p.254-5)

The priest looked at Katrice. Her quick reaction was to take my arm and nudge me off in the direction we were heading so that Mother Martha and the woman and her son could be alone to talk. Something of that nature happens almost every time we go out for a walk.

What does she say—what counsel is she giving, if that’s even the right word—when troubled-looking people stop her in the street, then show up later for a conversation with her at the church?

“She never gives me bullshit answers, ‘priestly’ answers,” says one of the toughest guys I know in the South Bronx, who’s had a lot of problems in the courts and has been in and out of jail. He talks to her, he says, “exactly the same way I’d talk to any man. No difference. No sweet ‘nicey’ stuff about atonement and forgiveness. I go to see her when my ass is scared. She’s tough with me. She can be very hard. I don’t mind toughness. When I need her, when I’m in real trouble, I know one thing: She’ll be there.”

I happened to run into him one night when six or seven officers had slammed him up against the wall. When I asked him what was wrong, one of the officers slammed me against the wall as well and told me to move on. “Call Mother Martha! Please!” he yelled as he was being shoved into the back of one of the patrol cars at the curb. Did she get him out? I never learned. By the next day there were new emergencies she had to deal with. So I never even had a chance to ask.

I have the impression that most priests and ministers in neighborhoods like this one spend a large part of their lives engaged in doing things for which they couldn’t possibly have been prepared by any part of their religious education. (Do seminaries teach a pastor what she’ll need to know to start a literacy class or choose computer software for a mathematics class, or how to get a judge to put a child’s parent into a drug-treatment program rather than in prison?) I also know that many pastors have to make a lot of difficult decisions that will change the lives of other people without ever having time to contemplate a wide array of options. Deferred decision-making is the privilege of those who look at social struggle with a relative degree of distance. At places like St. Ann’s, there is no distance. Everything is present. Almost everything is urgent. The risks of making wrong decisions are one burden that the priest must constantly incur; but the luxury of making no decision, or deferring a decision, is not often hers.

There are all kinds of heroines and heroes in the ordinary world. The ones I like to spend my time with are the preachers and the teachers who take on the hardest, messiest, and most exhausting work and still come out of it somehow with souls intact and particles of merriment still percolating in their personalities. I don’t know how they do it. I don’t have an idea in the world of where they find the sources of their energy and joy. I used to ask the pastor questions like this; I don’t ask these questions anymore. I stand there in the church on certain days and watch her at her work and simply feel a sense of awe and admiration that she ever dared to take a job like this, and doesn’t plan to give it up, but muddles through the worst of times, and keeps right on.

“The people I love the best,” writes poet and longtime activist Marge Piercy, “jump into work head first.” Instead of “dallying in the shallows,” they “swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.” When it’s time to plow, they “harness themselves” and “strain in the mud and muck to move things forward” and to “do what has to be done, again and again.” When emergencies come, they “work in a row and pass the bags along.” They “stand in the line and . . . haul in their places.” They “are not parlor generals and field deserters.” The work of the world, she says, “is common as mud.” When it’s botched, it “smears the hands” and “crumbles to dust.” Beautiful vases, after centuries go by, are “put in museums,” she writes, “but you know they were made to be used. . . . (Jonathan Kozol "Ordinary Resurections" 2000 p.256-7)

The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

I’ve thought of that final line when I was with a teacher in one of those very poorly funded schools like Morris High that get the students other schools reject and have the worst statistics in the city, but the teacher still was standing there with a big stack of papers in her hand and a real rush of energy within her voice as she spurred on the kids to finish Act Three of Macbeth, or do their book report on Toni Morrison, and did it with the same enthusiasm she would feel if she were teaching far more skillful and responsive kids at Exeter.

I’ve thought of it also at St. Ann’s on one of those heartbreaking days when several of the children or the older people had to deal with devastating news or make decisions in which either choice was going to be fraught with danger to themselves or someone else, and I could see the empathy and anguish—and the deep-down weariness as well—within the pastor’s eyes, and had to wonder if I was about to see her cry.

I’ve seen the priest cry only twice at St. Ann’s Church. Once was when a teenage boy who had been close to her for years said something cutting and sarcastic at a time of adolescent anguish, testing out his strength perhaps to see if he could injure somebody who loved him and discovering, to his regret, that he could do it with great ease.

The other time was when she came into the crowded afterschool one day holding a cup of hot tea she had brought back from Alí’s. She’d buried a parishioner that morning and then had to go to the cathedral for some reason, and her face was flushed, because she had been working with a fever for the past three days. Her hands were shaking slightly as she tried to pull the plastic cover from the cup. Then the lid went flying and the cup turned upside down and spilled its scalding contents on her hand and arm.

Katrice ran to the kitchen to get ice to press against the skin. Some of the children were nearby. They stood and stared. Mother Martha bit her lip. Then she began to cry.

What I remember is the look within the children’s eyes: immediate compassion, but also unspeakable alarm to see tears in the pastor’s eyes.

“She’s crying,” said Briana.

“Mother Martha’s crying,” said one of the older girls.

I know it frightened them. (Jonathan Kozol "Ordinary Resurections" 2000 p.258-9)

I sometimes wonder if he thinks of facts as "enemies" that can be handled best by indirection; .... finish them.

..... His mother worries, though, because she fears that it may dull his curiosity and possibly suppress some of his intellectual intensity.

Large amounts of psychotropic medicine are given to young children in the public schools of New York City, as in public schools all over the United States; and, in some cases, medical professionals have little supervision over how these medications are dispensed. At P.S. 30, thankfully, where every form of medication is dispensed to children by a nurse, and only in her office, children who take Ritalin and other drugs are closely supervised and also have the benefit of privacy, so other children will not stigmatize them. But there are inner-city schools where secretaries simply walk from room to room with trays of pills and pass them out to children listed on a dosage schedule they've been handed by somebody else.

Katrice tells me that several children she and I both know are no dependent upon drugs like Ritalin. In many instances, it's difficult to know what else can be done. If I were a teacher here and had a class of thirty children and if three or four of them were constantly in motion and disturbing other kids, as Otto does, I suppose I mightn't raise objection to these drugs. It does seem at times, that these drugs are being used in overcrowded urban schools to cope with situations that might not be so disruptive in a class of eighteen students where the teacher has more time to listen to the sometimes turbulent intelligence of children. That part of the pattern does seem troubling.

…. She goes without food until evening on the weekdays so she can afford to cook good meals at night for Otto and can pay for the extra things that he enjoys, like special trips into Manhattan. She also fills their home with educational materials and learning games to keep him occupied with something other than TV.

An attractive and sophisticated woman who grew up here in Mott Haven, she has had a huge amount of bad luck in her life. Homeless for a time during the 1980s, she was forced to bring her children to a dismal shelter that I used to visit in Manhattan, an atrocious place run by a man who wore a pistol on his ankle and was working for South African investors. Her older boys may have been damaged in that period of time, as were too many kids I knew. Several boys I met during those years who lived in midtown shelters were exposed to drugs and prostitution in those buildings and have since grown up into a life of crime. One of them writes to me from prison in upstate New York. I knew this boy when he was eight years old and used to spend his nights in Herald Square panhandling at traffic lights to get the money to buy food. He spent the past six years in Comstock, at a prison called Great Meadows, one of New York's 73 state prisons. (Jonathan Kozol "Ordinary Resurrections" 2000 p.268-9)

"Yes, that's good—that's right," says Mr. Hudson in approval as they sing. The principal, Miss Rosa, who has come down to the front part of the auditorium in time to hear the final song, joins the children in the final verse and then claps loudly.

New York once had comprehensive art and music programs for the children of the elementary schools. Most of this was terminated years ago as a cost-saving measure at a time of what was called "the fiscal crisis" in New York, around the same time that the city also took school doctors from the elementary schools and more or less dismantled what had once been very good school libraries in order to save money on librarians and books. Since that time there have been several long-extended periods of great prosperity in New York, and the city's revenues, of course, have soared in recent years during the escalations of stock values, which have brought unprecedented profits to the banking and investment principalities of Wall Street; but the savage cutbacks in the personnel and services available to children in the city's public schools, who now are overwhelmingly black and Hispanic, have not been restored.

So 3rd grade kids at P.S. 28 learn to make do, and make music, with imaginary flutes; and the children here at P.S. 30 get a couple of hours of good choral practice once or twice a week with a retired black instructor who received his love of music from a mother born to segregation in the South and does his best to pass these treasures on to children born into another kind of segregation, nearly as absolute but possibly a good deal less genteel and less protective than the somewhat milder kind of rural isolation that his mother knew some 60 years before.

The detail that stuck with me was the way he reached his hand out to the child who was lying on her stomach next to him and lightly touched her hair. I've seen Louis Bedrock, a 4th grade teacher, do exactly the same thing: reaching out one of his hands to graze one of the children on the shoulder, or an elbow, or her hair, not even looking up but knowing somehow that the child's there. The children in his class like to pretend that they're eavesdropping on his conversations, peering up at him obliquely like small espionage agents, with stage smiles. He'll just reach out while he and I are talking and locate the child's hand or arm and maybe draw the child in to him and hold her head beneath his arm like a good-natured soccer ball, and then look down and act surprised, as if to say, "What have we here?" (Jonathan Kozol "Ordinary Resurections" 2000 p.280-1)

(Jonathan Kozol "Ordinary Resurections" 2000 excerpt variation published at Ed Week

Katrice insisted when I asked. .... regret that I had not been there.

The light-hearted messages were interrupted by disturbing ones during the weeks that followed. An innocent man who was an immigrant from Africa was shot to death one night by the police in the South Bronx. His death before a fusillade of more than forty bullets from the guns of four policemen who had fired, almost ... ....

"This was her chair," the child's teacher told me on my next trip to New York. It was during recess. She was sitting at one of the children's tables, grading papers in the quiet ... (Jonathan Kozol "Ordinary Resurections" 2000 p.328-9)

St. Ann's Scholars

A discretionary fund has been established for the pastor of St. Ann's to use in ways that benefit the children in this book, with special emphasis on education and the opportunity for college. Readers who would like to add their own support may write to St. Ann's Scholars, St. Ann's Church of Morrisania, 295 St. Ann's Avenue, Bronx, NY 10454. Those who would like to know of other organizations advocating on behalf of children can contact the author at JonathanKozol.com